1. Technical Field
This disclosure relates to music technology and, more specifically, for technologies used to recreate sounds of various musical instruments, such as synthesizers and samplers.
2. Related Arts
The present author's two US patents for Divisi processes (U.S. Pat. Nos. 7,109,406 and 7,728,213) explain how to create divisi very much like that used by live musicians, but in an automated fashion suitable for sampled or synthesized sounds. The previously patented divisi processes generally incorporates a high voice count. In digital music production, “voice count” refers to the number of simultaneously playing recordings or discretely-generated sounds. As more notes are held on a keyboard or other note-designating system, and as notes continue to be sustained even after a key is released, the cumulative voice count increases. While the original implementations of the author's divisi processes were devised using digitally sampled music libraries, the processes were conceived equally to work with other types of synthesized sounds, and so while the specification uses examples based on sampled sounds these are intended to be exemplary and not limiting.
On a computer or digital note player, an increase in voice count will always increase the amount of CPU usage, and will also increase the amount of bandwidth used by the note player's memory, hard disk, or other data storage medium from which it streams the sampled recordings. Since the author's previously patented Divisi processes were designed to maintain the same number of recorded voices playing back consistently, regardless of the number of notes, they will always have a high voice count, regardless of the number of sub-sections into which the orchestra, band or other sampled entity is divided while playing. Although the author's earlier approach to Divisi represents a highly accurate method of reproducing a live ensemble, in some situations, such as when an entire section is playing in unison (all instruments playing the same note) this results an excessive amount of CPU usage. In turn, this limits the implementation of those earlier methods to use with more powerful, costly hardware systems, placing this technology out of reach for some potential users.